The missing link

2nd January 2013

Although it is not strickly rigging, we feel that this is something worth sharing. This is a good step forward in a otherwise fairly bleak landscape of sailing performance ‘Apps’:

(Source: KND SailingPerformance) In our world of tablets and Smart
phones, the likeliness that there will be one on board next time you sail is
close to certainty! On these devices, charting, weather forecast and routing
applications are now available offering useful information to cruising and
racing sailors. Using such tools the cruise can be made faster and more
pleasurable, avoiding as much as possible dead calms as well as storms.

Unfortunately, a small piece of
information is often missing, blocking the whole process: most sailors do not
know precisely their yacht’s polar. A polar is a table describing the boat
speed as a function of wind conditions (usually True Wind Angle and True Wind
Speed). This is a mandatory input in order to run a routing application, in
conjunction with a route plan (waypoints) and a wind forecast grib file.

“The generation within a few
seconds of routing polars for production yachts is a challenge that Olivier
Bouyssou asked us to address. Olivier is the father of the routing software
Weather4D Pro, and was looking for reliable routing polars for his users. One
has to understand that in the frame of our usual development and optimization
of high level racing yachts, such a question requires 1 to 2 days of work and
comes with a price tag fairly different from an iPad App…” says Dimitri
Nicolopoulos, one of the three KND-SailingPerformance founders. “We sat
down to discuss it, liked the idea, and decided to apply our expertise to the
development of a solution. Olivier Bouyssou’s support for the user interface
development allowed us to speed up iPolar development and for an official
release beginning of December during the Paris Boat Show.” adds Cyrille
Douillet, co-founder of the company.

iPolar is a simple Velocity Prediction
Program (VPP) working on a reduced set of parameters: length; displacement and
sail area(s). The simplicity of the input implies that the result’s accuracy is
good as long as the parameters remain close enough to production cruisers and
cruiser-racers. Roland Kleiter, KND-SailingPerformance co-founders and VPP
expert describes what’s ‘under the hood’: “iPolar is relying on a set of yacht
models which we designed with parameters covering the range going from
comfortable cruisers to cruiser racers. We developed accurate VPPs of these
yachts, producing a matrix of data. The trick is then to position precisely the
yacht described in iPolar’s input within this matrix in order to generate its
proper polars”.

iPolar
is now in the AppStore with a price of 9.99€.

About KND-SailingPerformance

KND-SailingPerformance (headquartered
in Valencia, Spain) has been founded by three engineers who met during the 32nd
America’s Cup. KND-SailinPerformance offers development and optimization
services to its client’s including in 2012: Groupama & Camper 1st and 2nd in the Volvo Ocean Race, MACIF,
Hugo Boss & Poujoulat currently racing the Vendée Globe, WildOats (5 times Sydney hobart winner!), BellaMente (Mini-Maxis
world champion) and the TP52 Quantum Racing.

Beyond our services to top level
projects, we have a broader vision to build on our expertise to develop
products for a wider audience. iPolar is the first milestone of a set of
performance analysis tools aimed at helping cruisers and club racers.